Undergraduate / 'I want to be brave instead of to be happy' - Admissions Essay (Transfer) [5]

In an essay I wrote my junior year of high school, my third high school and first year in Bellingham, I wrote as a conclusion to the 'who are you' prompt: "I don't know anything, I just want to be happy", and that eventually I would blow this rainy, grey town for California. Now, three years later, I have finally unpacked my last box, hung up art on my walls, and quietly let myself plan for a real future. In this future I ideally know a little more than nothing and want to be brave instead of happy. Because in all honesty, happiness for me often means complacent comfort, avoiding the possibility of confrontation, anxiety, and stress that I see represented in every new face, place and opportunity. To take action in educating myself, to ask for help when I need it, these are things that I have worked to persist in doing during my time at Whatcom Community College.

And although my somewhat uninspired grades of Bs and Cs might indicate otherwise, I never entered my initial college experience with the intention of killing time or drifting lackadaisically along. I grew up watching my parents become limited in their prospective fields by lack of higher education, whether it was on an army base or in an office, and this is the main reason I would never think to apply to college without a plan.

During my first year at Whatcom Community College I decided I wanted to put my AAS to use majoring in Art History at Western, and eventually get my masters in Library Science at the University of Washington.

When I started to seriously consider four year universities I had been living in Bellingham for about two years. It was around this time that I finally started to think of this town as my home, huge for a former military brat. And perhaps it is for this reason that Western Washington University, which might be considered the heart of Bellingham, was the institution I imagined myself at once I got my transfer degree. Then when I started to do more research into the diversity of Western's campus, the reputation of the art history program, the quality of the library, and the presence of clubs for people of similar nerdiness, my heart was set on attending. The pursuit of this goal in the environment of academia does require me to constantly check my fears, but fortunately the material is something I have always felt comfortable with.

In my pervasive need to be practical I did briefly consider undertaking a two year nursing degree through Whatcom's program, no need for a four year school and high prospects for a job out of school beckoned. But I remembered an old Art History textbook of my mom's that I had pored over since I was twelve and dog-eared like a well loved novel. I remembered the long list of libraries that became as familiar to me as my own home, as my family moved from place to place, and the instant wash of calm that came over me when I walked through those doors. So I interviewed librarians at local libraries, took as many classes related to the arts as I could, since few Art history courses are offered at Whatcom, and grew more and more sure that learning how to help others navigate the vast and growing amounts of information available to them, while specializing in a subject that I loved, was what I wanted to do.

most worried about grammar, sentence structure???